Emotion and desire play an important role here. The aesthetics of the development environment, the aesthetics of the ecosystem, for both the developer side and for the user/consumer/participant side.

emergentfutures:

Paul Higgins: A good reminder that despite the fact I liked the initial look of the technology it is the ecosystem that matters as well here

stoweboyd:

Marco Arment doesn’t actually say that Microsoft Surface or Windows 8 smartphones are doomed, but he cuts to the chase pretty fast: Microsoft is in real trouble because they are starting with next to zero apps, and app developers — like Marco — have migrated off Windows onto Mac:

Marco Arment via Marco.org

By 2005 or so, most of those developers were working on web apps. The web was the platform for that kind of work for most of that decade.²

And during that decade, almost every such developer I knew switched to the Mac if they weren’t already there, partly because it was better for developing web apps.³

That’s one of the biggest reasons there was so much pent-up developer interest in the iPhone before the App Store opened: these consumer-product developers were all using Macs already. As the dominant consumer platform shifted from the web to apps over the last four years, most talented consumer-product developers built products for their app platform of choice during that time: the Apple ecosystem.

Many Windows developers were upset that iOS development had to be done on a Mac, but it didn’t hurt Apple: the most important developers for iOS apps were already using Macs.

But the success of Windows 8 and Windows Phone in the consumer space requires many of those consumer-product developers, now entrenched in the Apple ecosystem, to care so much about Windows development that they want to use Windows to develop for it.

How likely is that?

Anything’s possible, but that’s going to be an uphill battle.

Actually, I don’t think that anything’s possible. But Microsoft might be able sway some developers by subsidizing development of critical apps, as reported by Bijan Sabet. I don’t think that will be enough.